U.K. Is Right to Fight on Fees (Hester Plumridge)
Investment banks stand accused of overcharging U.K. companies for raising equity capital. The Office of Fair Trading has announced an inquiry, on the heels of the Institutional Investor Council’s investigation launched last month. But neither is likely to inflict much damage.

EDF’s Promising Power Play (Matthew Curtin)
Normally, a former electricity monopoly facing an unprecedented increase in domestic competition would be an unappealing investment. Not in France. Electricité de France, which still provides 83% of the country’s energy needs, is to be forced to sell 25% of it nuclear production to alternative suppliers to comply with European Union rules. Yet such is France’s hostility to energy-sector liberalization that the new rules are likely to be framed in a way that may actually improve EDF’s earnings prospects.

The Financial Times (Subscription required)
Lex Column

Botched Probabilities
Believers in the markets’ wisdom occasionally wind up like the apocryphal economics professor who left a $100 bill lying on a busy sidewalk, figuring that it would have been picked up already if it were real. Shares can be mispriced at the best of times and especially at the worst of times, the latter surely applying to BP. Even with the not insignificant possibility that shareholders get wiped out, money is being left on the sidewalk.

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